Last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was a considerable leap forward for generative AI on mobile devices. With the demand for these features booming more than ever, the mobile platforms have to evolve to power the next wave of complex generative AI features.
The latest Snapdragon 8 Elite makes significant improvements to the Qualcomm AI engine, bringing multimodal generative AI and enhanced personalized AI solutions to devices powered by this platform. This will revolutionize the way users experience and benefit from AI on their smartphones.
AI gets a shot in the arm with the Snapdragon 8 Elite
Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, multimodal generative AI apps run swiftly and efficiently with ultra low latency and enhanced privacy directly on device. The improvements made to the Qualcomm AI engine allow the custom Oryon CPU to do much of the heavy lifting so that the other parts of the AI engine can focus on AI-specific tasks.
The Hexagon NPU is now 45% faster and boasts 45% improved performance per watt. It features additional cores in the scalar and vector accelerators for increased throughput across all accelerators for faster inferencing. Your interactions with AI assistants will also be faster due to the new multimodal model.
Previously, these interactions required a speech to text process whereby the commands you’d spoken were first converted to text for the language model to understand. That extra step has been eliminated in the new multimodal model, which also supports longer token inputs, meaning you can provide a lot more information for the model to process and it will do that effectively.
Personalization has also been improved with the enhancements made to the Qualcomm Sensing Hub, which is better at understanding personal context now to make more relevant suggestions. This, in addition to the AI-related enhancements that the Snapdragon 8 Elite makes to the camera and connectivity, will make devices powered by this new mobile platform unrivaled in terms of the AI features they provide customers.
New devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite are confirmed to arrive in the coming months, including those by Samsung. At least one Galaxy S25 model—the S25 Ultra—is likely to exclusively ship with the Snapdragon 8 Elite worldwide.
Disclaimer: Qualcomm is hosting a large group of international media for the Snapdragon Summit 2024 from October 21-23 in Hawaii, including SamMobile. All opinions and analyses remain our own with Qualcomm receiving no advance preview or exercising any control over our coverage.
